Bulgari has its world record back. On Monday, the Italian luxury house with the Swiss fine watchmaking division reclaimed the record for the world’s thinnest mechanical wristwatch.
The Octo Finissimo Ultra Mark II is 1.7 millimeters thick, 0.05 millimeters thinner than Richard Mille’s 1.75 millimeter RM UP-01 Ferrari, which two years ago snatched the record from Bulgari’s 1.8 millimeter Octo Finissimo Ultra.
The difference? Half a tenth of a millimeter, approximately the thickness of a piece of office printer paper.
“This is sci-fi,” Antoine Pin, managing director of Bulgari’s watchmaking division, said of his record-breaker. “It makes people excited and brings global attention to the segment. After all, people don’t come to Bulgari for the rational, and you don’t buy a mechanical watch for the perfection of the time-keeping process.”
The race for the world’s thinnest mechanical watches has sped up in recent years.
Establishment watchmakers such as Audemars Piguet, Jaeger-LeCoultre and Piaget quietly jostled for super-slim supremacy for decades, then, in 2014, Bulgari’s newly formed fine watchmaking division slid into the record books for the first time with its five-millimeter Octo Finissimo Tourbillon, then the world’s thinnest tourbillon (a record that Piaget was scheduled to rewrite Tuesday with the introduction of its 2-millimeter-thick Altiplano Ultimate Concept Tourbillon).
